Tellings

Years ago, just after my second book came out, I attended a swishy Penguin event to welcome the man of that particular hour, David Davidar, to the company. (Not all that many years later, this is what became of him.) Afterward, because sometimes canapés just aren’t enough, my editor invited all “her” authors out for dinner. I ended up beside a young woman I’d never met before, who, before the appetizers arrived, had already made it clear where she stood on a number of issues. One of them was TV.

“I don’t even have one,” she said, in a tone that managed to be snippy as well as languid. “There’s simply not enough time to write—so why would I possibly waste my time on TV?”

I said something like, “I really enjoy TV”, in a voice that trailed pretty quickly into silence. Her self-satisfaction was intolerable, but it was also daunting; I didn’t have it in me to challenge her.

Now, ten years later, I will. Because (and this is both rationalization and truth): TV helps me with writing. And in a related “because”: Justified.

I’ve always said that I’m not really any good at plot, possibly because I pay too much attention to certain reader reviews. (“It’s a story that’s definitely more about people and character than about a fast action plot”; “The plot-minded part of my mind — ha — got bored because it felt like nothing was happening”; “Didn’t read until the end, wasn’t going anywhere”—I could, but won’t, go on.) The Silences of Home was tough, plotting-wise: so many threads and creatures and battles, which I’m still convinced I’m not good at, either. The Pattern Scars: different reasons, but same problematic plotting. Walking briskly down to the beach sometimes didn’t help. Sitting in coffee shops with a fresh notebook page in front of me often didn’t help. What did help, in both cases, was Law & Order: SVU. Yes. Because every night (thank you, syndication) I got to see how formula can work, and work well. And how characterization can be done deftly, or not, and what effect that has on plot. Part of my brain would be actively following the stories; another part would be quietly making associations and decisions about my own story. I wouldn’t be able to give any specific examples of these decisions, if someone asked me to, and I know this sounds like an authorial brand of truthiness, but: Trust me. I know it happened because I felt it happening.

And it’s not just about plot, whose requirements can be fulfilled even via not-so-great TV. Watching a good story provokes the kind of raw, emotional response that makes you want to tell a good story. Take Justified. My god, the heady joy of it: the language (especially the Boyd-Raylan banter), the crossing and double-crossing, the mayhem and murder, the inter-family vendettas that run so deep they’re practically chromosomal—but really, especially, the language. Your jaw drops, listening to it. It surprises.

I think that’s what this blog entry has been trying to say, o long-ago Penguin dinner companion of mine. Like any art, TV, at its best, is unexpected. It’s new. It hits you in the gut and the synapses and shakes you out of solipsistic creative doldrums. It can also make you want to drink bourbon. A lot of it.

I feel as if I do a lot of whining in this blog—when I’m writing about writing, anyway. Part of me thinks this is OK, because I’m being honest, and writers so often talk only about the positive, exciting stuff. Part of me thinks it’s disingenuous: I want to be admired for my honesty. So I’m going to promise myself (and you) that I’ll stop with the possibly disingenuously honest anecdotes about writing-time-gone-by.

Right after this.

*

Two weeks ago, thanks to my publisher and the Canada Council, I went to New York City. There, at the fabulous Books of Wonder, I was on a panel: “Teen Debut Spotlight.”

Two of my three fellow panelists were considerably younger than I was. These were their first novels—to remember my first, I have to go back twelve years. I was 33 then, wide-eyed at my trips to Penguin headquarters; delighted by expense-accounted lunches with my editor, an actual professional who wanted to talk to me about my first book. My second, two years later, was supposed to be my breakout book. I was put up at the Fairmount Hotel Vancouver, on my book tour—on the same floor as Wallace Shawn! There was a lounge, on that floor only, open at all hours, full of fresh food and freshly-opened wine bottles and copies of The New York Times and The Guardian. “How would you like your coffee, Ms. Sweet?” “My…coffee?” “Yes. We’ll bring it to your room whenever you like, in the morning. With a newspaper of your choice, and a yogurt parfait.” The parfait was delicious. The bathrobe was plush. Pope John Paul had just died; I lounged about on the plumpest pillows imaginable, watching images of the Vatican on mute while my very small children mumbled into the phone, from four provinces away.

Just over a year later, in the bar of a convention hotel, a young man was holding forth at great length about the awesome deal his awesome agent had just made for his awesome young adult trilogy—the plot of which he went on to explain in loving detail. Even during my own recent period of heady, publishing-related delight, I would never have gone on and on as he did—not because I hadn’tbeen headily delighted, not because I hadn’twanted to gush and inspire more than a little impressed, say, envy, but because I’d been afraid of seeming self-absorbed. (And I had been self-absorbed, of course—just silently.) Anyway: I was having a really bad convention. I’d just received my so-called “royalty statement” from Penguin; it showed a negative sales number, and five figures of in-the-red, misplaced publishing hopes.

I very rarely let myself snap at anyone, in social or professional situations; I’m terrified of not being liked. But I saw actual red, as the guy talked on, and on, and my insides were acid with envy and defeat, and so I snapped at him. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something like, “I was promised that great things would happen to me, too. Get back to me in five years—no, three: we’ll see where you are by then.”

He raised his eyebrows at me. The people gathered in the circle of comfy bar chairs stared—or I assume they did; I was seeing a kind of puce, now. At some point, probably far more quickly than I imagined, someone said something subject-changing, and I subsided into my chair because it would have been too humiliating to leap to my feet and flee, as I so badly wanted to.

Over a year later, I ran into the guy at another convention. He grinned at me. “Hey: you’re the bitter, resentful one!” I had to agree that I was. (I have no idea what happened with his YA trilogy.)

Now back to Manhattan, in 2015. I’m on a panel. The other three panelists are younger than I am (two of them waaaay younger), and so effortlessly, gorgeously stylish that I (in my Blundstones and brown cords) want to leap to my feet and flee the moment I see them. Two are first-time authors. The third already has a movie deal. (To her enormous and hard-to-credit credit, she doesn’t mention this on the panel: I find it out four days later, via the full-page ad her publisher has taken out in the New York Times Books section.)

We each read brief sections from our books, then answer the moderator’s questions, then the audience’s. The other authors gush about their agents, all of whom are effortlessly, gorgeously stylish, and sitting right in front of us. I talk about how my New York agent dumped me over my penultimate book, and how a succession of agents turned down my last one. I manage to be both nonchalant and defiant about this, and I get all the right kinds of laughs—but my insides are acid with envy and defeat. In one of my other answers, I work in mention of Penguin; I need these agents and editors, here in the Mecca of publishing, to know that I was once with a Big House. (I almost don’t mention that it was Penguin Canada, because I know it’ll undermine the whole Big House thing: my NY former agent always told me that Anything Canada would be considered a backwater company, here in Mecca.) I want to turn to the three women beside me and snap, “I was promised that great things would happen to me, too. Get back to me in five years—no, three: we’ll see where you are by then.”

Some audience members ask me questions. Three of them buy my book. They’re eager to talk to me, as I autograph the books. They’re wonderful. I’m grateful to them—and I very badly want to leave.

The next day there’s no more writing stuff: there are just the Cloisters, and an ego gone blessedly, if only briefly, quiet.

They’re electronic. They have gorgeous covers. And they’re mine—my first two novels, long out of print. The brief introductions I wrote for these new editions are below, along with the links to the e-books themselves.

They’re back, baby.

*

I started A Telling of Stars when I was twenty. I was nursing a broken heart and an unrelated yet equally overwhelming sense of disillusionment with fantasy; I thought I’d try to address the latter, anyway. I’d write a story that was difficult, that offered ambiguity instead of closure, rendered in language that would be lush, as wonder-inspiring as what it described. I’d subvert tropes all over the place. It would be my protest fantasy, and there wouldn’t be a single family tree diagram or whiff of capitalized Good and Evil in the entire thing. And I’d write it for me—just me.

I started Telling in a tiny bachelor apartment, on a blustery December night in Montreal; I finished it on a sunny November morning six years later, in a tiny Toronto bungalow. I put it away, then. I had no idea whether I’d achieved what I’d set out to do, all those years before, and I wasn’t nearly as vehement and fierce and angry as I’d been then. I was sad, mostly. A dear friend of mine had died, as I was writing; another died as I was revising. They were both in the book, as was the guy who broke my heart, and my first love (who didn’t). My protagonist’s grief, longing, helplessness and hope were mine. I figured it would end this way, for her: with a manuscript that I put in a box. But it didn’t. Years later, I hauled it out and reread it. And I got an agent. An editor. A publisher. Readers who weren’t my parents and sister. It was a dizzying, amazing thing—until a few years after that, when it slipped quietly out of print. I figured it would end that way.

My first novel, A Telling of Stars wasn’t supposed to be published. It was my own personal protest fantasy novel, begun when I was twenty, and all fired up to subvert tropes. But then, ten years after I’d started it, I found myself with a Penguin Canada editor (the marvellous Barbara Berson—who, like me, is no longer with Penguin Canada). She loved it, despite or perhaps because of its first-novel excesses—and she wanted The Next One.

Part of Telling’s trend-bucking, I’d told myself from the beginning, was its stand-alone-ness. I would not write a sequel. No way. This was one young woman’s story; the reader would see her world through her eyes, only. But all those years later, casting about for another idea, her world wouldn’t let go of me. Fine, I thought. Not what happens after her; what happened before. Whether because I badly needed to rationalize breaking my own iron-clad rule, or because there actually was a difference, the prequel thing felt right. Jaele’s story was definitely done, but the story that had inspired her journey—the legend of Queen Galha, who’d lived hundreds of years before Jaele’s birth—still hadn’t been told. Not really. Because what if the tale of Galha’s epic revenge quest wasn’t at all like what had actually happened?

I had no idea, when I thought up the legend of Queen Galha, that I’d completely overturn it, in a subsequent book. (Yes, mostly because I never thought there’d be a subsequent book.) But that’s what I did—and it was so much fun. Jaele encountered people and creatures and places, in Telling, but she never stayed long, and I never had to fully understand any of them. In The Silences of Home, I had to fully understand them. I returned to the shonyn’s riverbank, the Alilan’s painted wagons, the lofty spires of Luhr. I figured out the Sea Raiders’ real names, and what their homeland was like before Galha got there. These were delirious discoveries. Silences is much longer than Telling, and much more involved—but I wrote it in a nine-month blur, in 1.5-hour increments, while one daughter was at kindergarten and the other daughter was napping. It remains the most thrilling writing experience I’ve ever had.

How and why does history become legend? I hope you enjoy finding out as much as I did.

I’m reading the Harry Potter series for the first time—aloud, to 12.75-year-old Younger Daughter. We’re three quarters of the way through The Goblet of Fire. There are some neat, worldbuilding-related details, and some preteen, best friend moments that are kind of touching. But other than that: man, these books are flat. Flat, derivative and dull. Rowling slaps new names on fantasy tropes, murmurs Tolkienorum Rowlingiosa, and makes a billion dollars—and no, it’s not sour grapes talking, here, truly: it’s befuddled boredom.

And it’s not just me. “Oh great,” Younger Daughter sighs, when there’s another quiddich match or Triwizard contest coming, “one more thing Harry’s just going to win because he’s Harry. And if he doesn’t win, he’ll only win BIGGER next time.” And, yesterday, “Characters should change: that’s what makes stories really interesting. But no one’s really changed at all.” *

When I was Younger Daughter’s age, I constructed elaborate fantasies before I fell asleep. I was the Chosen One, plucked from my mundane existence (indeed, from Earth itself!) to take my place among a fellowship of others who were a little older than I was, and wise, and hot, and wielded powers they (or the hottest one among them, anyway) would teach me. Because I had those powers, too. Always had, without knowing it—except that yes, I’d known (somehow, I’d always known): I was different. I was special. And there was somewhere far, far away that was so much more amazing than 20th century Canada. The yearning hurt. The yearning was wonderful. I remember lavishing many, many bedtimes on the plucked-from-mundane-existence part, and on the training-in-magic part. After that, the scenarios got vaguer. So now I’m trained up. I’m ready. I’m listening to the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back, and I’m taking on a baddie with my hot companions, and now we’ve won, and we’re celebrating, and there’s some kissing. Aaaaand…back to the beginning. Because what can top the first victory, other than a series of other victories that will look and feel the same, only not quite as good? And really, the best part of the fantasy was being identified as a magical and special being in front of all my school friends—and maybe dropping back to visit them once I’d kicked baddie ass and done some kissing. Definite high points. But the fantasies got thin. They wore out. Because how often can you win? How satisfying is it to strive and suffer in a magical place but to know everything will be okay, always, no matter what?

I’m also reading something else now (silently, to myself): The Magicians trilogy. Sometimes, when I tell non-genre readers that I write fantasy, they say, “Like Harry Potter with grownups?” I always cast about, trying to figure out how to respond (and so many people ask me this question: how is it possible that I have to come up with some new iteration of answer every time?). Next time I’ll say, “No: Lev Grossman wrote those.” He wrote them deliberately, interrogating fantasy tropes, extrapolating and expanding: Boy Magician Grows Up. Things Are Gritty. Magic Isn’t Wonderful; Magical Lands Are Strange and Creepy. Brakebills is Hogwarts and Fillory is Narnia, with pockets of Wonderland and Oz and Middle Earth, and it’s all incredibly intellectually satisfying—the way the story’s mirrors and clockwork reflect and refract it, and all the other stories from which it sprang; the way it buttresses and deconstructs the expectations and longings of both characters and readers. You can’t call it derivative, because it’s so deliberate. Grossman doesn’t just slap new names on old tropes and pass them off as wildly inventive: he lines them up, their former names intact and invoked, and performs careful narrative thought experiments on them.

He’s not just clever: he’s an excellent writer, and a particularly excellent writer of character. His protagonist’s motivations are so painfully true, and so beautifully expressed, that I actually find myself squirming on the couch as I read. And I’m reading fast: the entire first book in a day, and now, on day two, well into the second. (The statutory holidays have helped.)

So this is it, right? The antidote. Smart, well-written escapism (about escapism). I should be loving the hell out of this series. Right?

But I’m not. I’m liking it. A lot. I’m appreciating its layers, its perfect pitch, and its wry self-consciousness (“I just don’t see Plover coming up with all that stuff on his own,” says one of the characters, referring to the author who, in the Magician books, wrote the Fillory books). But it’s precisely this clever self-consciousness that keeps me from loving it. I can’t lose myself in an experiment, however eloquent or successful.

So what do I want?

Once again, as I have since I was about eight, I turn to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles for guidance. They tread the same well-worn paths so many stories have, before and since. After vanquishing the big baddie with a motley but wonderful group of companions, the orphaned assistant pig-keeper finds out he’s actually the High King. He proposes to the spunky, red-headed princess. The end. Escape complete; fulfillment of characters and reader, total.

But not quite. Moments after the princess has tossed her head and agreed to marry the assistant pig-keeper-turned-king comes this final paragraph (SPOILER ALERT for any of you who haven’t read these absolutely wondrous books, and intend to):

And so they lived many happy years, and the promised tasks were accomplished. Yet long afterward, when all had passed away into distant memory, there were many who wondered whether King Taran, Queen Eilonwy, and their companions had indeed walked the earth, or whether they had been no more than dreams in a tale set down to beguile children. And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.

I remember crying, the first time I read this, grinding my fists against my eyes. I loved these characters. They were real to me—only they weren’t. I knew it. The man who’d conjured them knew it. Even that last line wasn’t enough: I still cried, protesting and accepting; so, so happy, and so incredibly sad. It wasn’t the simple regret of coming to the end of a great book; it was a dizzying feeling, of being prodded awake by the author and sent gently back out into the world, suddenly understanding that nothing, no matter how beloved or perfect, lasts. Taran and Eilonwy might have gained everything, but I hadn’t. The yearning was still there, and it still hurt—wonderfully.

Magic that feels organic, not calculated. Longing (the characters’ and/or my own) that’s never completely assuaged. These maddeningly subjective things are what I want.

And now I’m off again to Fillory—though it’ll always be Prydain I’m trying to find.

*I know that at least a few of you will say, “But you’re only on book 4—things get REALLY DARK in the next one.” I’ll get back to you on that.

I’m sitting in bed, covered in blankets and cats, sinking into the falling-snow quiet that’s somehow seeping through the walls of the house. The house is quiet inside, too: I’m the only human here, and will be for the next two days. I’d be in Montreal with Peter now, except that I’m waiting for the call or text that will propel me out into the snow, into a cab, into a hospital, to attend the birth of a friend’s baby boy.

Why not check The Door in the Mountain‘s page on amazon.ca, while I’m waiting?

There was one review, as of a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly, there’s a second. 3.5 stars—sigh—but it’s the subject header that grabs me by the throat: “A disappointing second novel.”

Obviously, I’m disappointed that she was disappointed. But “second novel”?

What Bothers Me, #1:
It’s an understandable mistake. For years after my actual second book came out, I’d encounter people (not many, but some) who’d say something like, “I loved A Telling of Stars!” To which I’d say something like, “Thank you! Have you read the prequel, The Silences of Home?” And to a person, they’d look puzzled. “A prequel? You mean you’ve written another book?”

What Bothers Me, #2:
I’m very fond of my first two books.

What Bothers Me, #3:
If this reader thought that The Door in the Mountain was a weak second showing, what would she think if she knew that it was, in fact, my fourth?

What Reassures Me:
My first two novels will be coming out as e-books in the next couple of months. New covers; new format; new audience?

Now I go back to waiting for the call that will summon me to baby boy’s arrival. And while I do, I’ll let my real second book have the last word(s):

They walked around the room once, twice; she leaned against him when the pains came. He imagined that she would tire and sit, or maybe lie down – for the baby must be close to coming now. But she shuffled on, stopping in the same places with each circuit, and he came to know each brushstroke of these places, and every bump or pit in the stone – and still she walked and leaned. He breathed with her: deep and quickening as the pain began, and lengthening, softer as it ended. He held her hips as she hung from him with her arms around his neck; he felt her breathing and her cool, dry skin…The pains began to come even more closely together, so that she hardly took three steps before another was upon her. She cried, “Lie down, lie down” and kept crying out, even after she was on her pallet: she wailed without pause and seemingly without breath, and he knelt beside her, all his certainty dissolving. She no longer looked at him, and although she still clutched his hands, when he wrapped them around hers, she did not truly seem to notice them, or him. Be with her, he told himself, to quell his fear. Follow her in every moment – that is all. He felt his calm returning – but then her parted lips shaped words.

Fire beats against sky and skin. Outside, where there are stars – but there only because of this other fire, deep deep within. A body like a brand, a body tight and hard as metal; not a body. The flames twist and climb and burrow and they will always be here, searing breath black – but not always: a break, smoke billowing in wind. The body returned. A surge and a heavy thrusting weight, another, another, and then the space of wind again, for breathing and looking at the sky of desert, lake, woods. Pressure like falling or floating underwater, too long but no other choice – and the weight moving down and through. The body filled and open, tearing with a different fire – another body, easing slow and vast, then rushing slithering weightless free.

Peter’s new book came out a couple of days ago. It’s been lauded in Publishers Weekly, Locus, the Los Angeles Review of Books; accrued a slew of multi-starred reviews on Amazon and Goodreads; inspired incredibly detailed renderings of its featured spacecraft, by fans who must have devoured the book in a matter of hours. He’s still responding to the questions that poured in during his Reddit “appearance,” the other night.

And then there’s me.

*

I’m in tears. I hate the tears, and the useless, hurt silence that preceded them.

He asks me what’s wrong, but I know he already knows. We’ve been through this before, albeit somewhat less damply. Jesus, I think, stop fucking crying; let him enjoy his first book in eight years… But I can’t. I snivel and stammer, and he puts his hand on my leg and listens.

“When you gripe about a blog post getting only 15 responses, I try to remember the last time I had one. You had thousands of hits on your website today; the only time I came close was after we got married and you linked to the post I made about my vows. About 90% of the people who find my website came from yours! [I see this on my stats page, in the “Came from” section.] You talk about how your publisher lowballs authors; I think about how I once had a big publisher and two big advances, and how that changed, so drastically. When I was in London, Joe Abercrombie [whom I adore and respect] introduced me to another writer as ‘Caitlin, Peter Watts’ wife.’ Now, when you were in the hospital, recovering from almost dying, and I was by your bed every day for two weeks, the nurses all called me ‘Mrs. Watts.’ We weren’t even married then! But I didn’t mind the Mrs. thing at all. The London thing, though? I laughed, because I love being your wife—and also because Joe was so adorably embarrassed when the person he was introducing me to said, ‘And is she perhaps something other than Peter Watts’ wife?’ But it would be really nice if someone knew me as a writer. It would be really fucking nice. I have so many petty, envious moments when it comes to author friends or acquaintances: the ones who get three-book deals or sell film rights or complain because they can’t keep up with the fan mail. But I don’t live with them. I don’t watch them check Amazon rankings and Twitter, or come across amazing new reviews….”

I feel like an amoeba. I feel like Godzilla. Peter’s hand is still on my leg. He’s quiet. Listening.

“You make your living at writing. I don’t. So why does it matter to me—the advances, the reviews, the Amazon rankings and ratings? Okay, so that’s a stupid question. But it’s the receding horizons thing: all I want is an agent/no: an editor/no: another book/no: a trilogy/wait: now a TV series…. [Once upon a time, a very successful fantasy author explained this concept to me, after he’d been complaining about movie deal discussions he was having with Hollywood types. “I know,” he said, with patronizing accuracy, “you only wish you had my problems.”]

“So here’s the thing. [There were, in fact, many ‘things’ in this monologue.] I landed with a fabulous small press when commercial houses refused to take me on. I get to write the kinds of books I want; I don’t have to box myself into formula or a sub-genre-du-jour that doesn’t do anything for me. I don’t need to make money from my writing; it can be my passion, not my livelihood. All of which should make me feel liberated and lucky. Right? But my latest book is…what? I don’t know. It’s nowhere. No one likes it. [I’m fully aware that this isn’t true, but there’s no stopping me.] I don’t even want to finish the sequel. I hate everything. I want more. I AM SO DUMB.”

Godzilla subsides into the sea (though we both know he’ll re-emerge: he’s a franchise monster). The amoeba extends a pseudopod that happens to be shaped like a human hand. Peter takes it and puts his forehead against it. He says some things that are careful, loving, understanding. I smile, damply. He smiles. He lets me go, but only to head for the kitchen—because it’s his turn to make dinner. Feta pasta, with, perhaps, a chaser of green ginger wine brought from London.

I spent my four BA years reading, thinking about reading, writing about reading. I read Milton and Hesse, Lorca and Kincaid, Senghor and de Beauvoir, Borges and Whichever “Anonymous/es” Wrote Beowulf. I hunkered down in sentences and examined individual words; I built entire essays around an image. I didn’t always enjoy this; in fact, near the end of my fourth year I wondered if I’d remember how to read for pleasure, once I was out of university. But what I remember now (through a haze of nostalgia and distance, granted) is how it felt to wander around the McGill campus with my head full of words: other people’s and my own. I remember that the inside of my head felt prickly, juddery, always a little off-kilter. There was a restlessness about this reading and thinking that I’ve never come close to, since.

Until yesterday, in a lecture hall in the Ramsay Wright Laboratories (aka Department of Cell and Systems Biology) at the University of Toronto, where I sat with the students of an undergraduate English class as they discussed The Pattern Scars.

The first thing I saw, other than the students themselves (and I was almost too afraid to look too closely at them), was a screen with lecture notes projected onto it—via laptop, not the overheads of my own undergrad days, whose images inevitably warped at the edges. The Pattern Scars‘ cover was up there, and quotes about fantasy, and my book’s subversion thereof. As the lecture progressed there were quotes taken directly from the book itself, and discussion points about Nola: the varieties of her victimhood and imprisonment; the paradox of her desire for the power, and the man, she hated; the writing of her own story; her ending, which could be seen as her first and final act of autonomy.

One student said that he’d hated this ending, as a reader who had narrative and emotional expectations, but also that he’d completely understood it—that it had been right.

Another student remarked on the syntax of Nola’s “Teldaru cursed me” statement, in which she continued to make herself an object, even at the moment of her freeing.

There was talk of finding/becoming/formulating yourself through the reading of a text—and my god, there I sat, finding/becoming/formulating myself through other people’s readings of my text. Words like “meta” and “intertextuality” swam up from 1990 and made my head feel prickly, juddery, more than a little off-kilter.

I haven’t been in Nola’s world for years. Seeing her words up there, larger than life, made me teary. Watching students flip through their copies of the book made me teary. It’s a good thing no one was paying attention to me, because I was so relentlessly teary.

I’d recovered by the time I did my reading: a passage from the as-yet-unnamed Door in the Mountain sequel. After that I answered questions from instructor and students—a lovely cascade of questions, after an initial, silent, collective hesitation. I’d had three hours of sleep the night before, and I’d so recently been, yes, teary; I was sure, right up until I started speaking, that I’d stumble over both the reading and my answers. I don’t think I did. I felt wonderful.

Students lined up to get their books signed, after the Q&A time ran out. I signed a few, then glanced up and saw how long the line was, and felt a little shaky again.

So I got to go back, for a few hours, to a room where people talked about words, and what they might mean. To have those words be “Nola”, “Bardrem”, “Otherseeing”, “Sweet, The Pattern Scars, 2011”—well, as I might have written in my journal, in 1990, after a particularly overwhelming class: It was too much. Too painfully, wonderfully much.

The woman in the foreground (Rhiannon, I believe) shares my hair colour. My cover is huge. I am small.

Last week, Peter Watts tagged me in something called “The Writing Process Blog Tour”. I’m going to be lazy, and let him outline the terms: “It’s kind of an authorial chain letter. An author receives a series of questions (presumably of interest to the reading public); answers them on their blog; passes them on in turn to three other authors downstream.”

I’ve settled on two authors for tagging, rather than three, since I’m fairly sure this won’t impede or impoverish the exercise.

What Am I Working On?

I’m finishing up the sequel to The Door in the Mountain, which was published last month. The sequel is nameless, as of now—pretty typical, as I tend to take a couple of years to churn out hundreds of thousands of words, then agonize for what feels like almost as long over the very few words that will make up the title. My deadline for this one’s rapidly approaching, though, so I’m going to have to rely on relatively quick thinking—mine, or someone else’s: my publisher’s running a “Name this Book!” contest. So if you love Greek mythology, have a thing for Minotaurs, ancient Crete, and/or beautiful, bitchy princesses: e-mail your ideas to doorcontest@chizinepub.com. Even if you haven’t read The Door in the Mountain. Seriously. Because sometimes out-of-the-ether insights kick the butt of authorial overthinking. (Of course, if you’d rather read The Door in the Mountain first, that would be great.)

How Does My Work Differ From Others In Its Genre?

This is a hard one. I’m always profoundly irritated when authors say things like, “My book’s going to turn fantasy on its head, because it’s SO dark/edgy/bracingly anti-epic/in every way unlike anything ever written in the history of the genre/etc.!” My irritation has to do with the smug, self-conscious, self-indulgent tone, and the certainty that difference means superiority.

So I’ll let some readers weigh in. I know: it’s unwise to turn to Goodreads reviews for trenchant, considered critique, and certainly for ego boosting or cheering up. But many of the readers who weigh in there have identified elements of my books as unique or different—and I figure it’s okay to quote them. Several of them: not just the ones who say these unique and different elements are fabulous.

To wit, re: my first book, A Telling of Stars:

“The plot is very nearly anti-fantasy. It’s beautifully written, it’s thoroughly imagined, and it messes with the reader’s expectations. So much will depend on your tolerance for being messed with.”

And:

“The plot-minded part of my mind got bored because it felt like nothing was happening.”

Re: The Door in the Mountain:

“I really liked Caitlin Sweet’s writing style, because it brought to life Ancient Crete. The style of writing is not like that of a typical YA novel; Sweet’s writing really brings texture and vividness to the classical myth of the Minotaur. Detailed and clear, the world building in The Door in the Mountain was really enjoyable.”

And:

“There is a strong focus on imagery that makes the story almost come alive as the reader can easily imagine being in the fictional world that she creates. Unfortunately, all of this lavish detail is ultimately a detriment to the actual story as there really is very little that happens in the story and the action almost seems like an afterthought.”

“Cool! Ouch! Cool!” Ah, Goodreads…

Why Do I Write What I Do?

Co-workers at every one of my day jobs, including the one I have now, frequently say, “Oooh: you’re a writer—are you going to put me in one of your books?” or “Oooh: I bet you’re going to write about this place, because it’s so crazy!” Then there are the people who say, “You write fantasy, huh? So when are you going to write about something real?”

In part, I write fantasy because I have a day job, a night job, kids. I’ve always written fantasy, because even before the jobs and kids there were schools of various sorts, and all the other obligations and associations of “the real world. ” “Ah—so it’s all about escapism,” some would say (or sneer) to this—and yes, that’s true. It’s simply more fun to imagine life in a desert palace in a place called Luhr than it is to render life in a government cubicle in a big North American city.

But it’s more than that.

I tried once, in a fit of “maybe all those genre detractors are onto something and I won’t be a decent writer until I produce something real”, to work on a contemporary story. It was set in an old house near the wonderfully funky Kensington Market in Toronto—but within twenty pages the house had turned into a mini-Gormenghast, and its lone inhabitant into a sort of sexy Radagast the Brown. (Am tempted to work “ghastly” in here somewhere, but won’t.) I remember that birds fluttered amongst the ivy that covered his living room walls, and alit on his head and shoulders… I just couldn’t stick to the “real” plan, and this was so stupidly crushing that poor sexy Radagast and his birds, and the heartbroken young woman who’d wandered into their Gormenghast, simply ceased to be.

Wonder, awe and magic have proven to be the only paths to fiction, for me. Not as a reader: I read all kinds of genres, from Jack Reacher (yes, I believe he’s his own genre, at this point) to Borges to Austen to Stephen King. As a writer, though, it’s always been fantasy, always impossible places and people that allow me to get to those things that are real: struggle, transformation, the torment and beauty of creatures trying to fumble their way through the same world.

How Does My Writing Process Work?

1. Finish writing a book.

2. Spend months scrabbling through old “ideas” notes, because I have not one single new idea for another book—but the old ones never lead to anything except MY GOD I’VE WRITTEN MY LAST THING EVER…

3. Have an idea.

4. Make a few vague notes about where the story might go; make many detailed notes about the beginning.

5. Write the beginning—on the streetcar to work, or at a café on my lunch break, or at a pub on Thursday nights.

6. After between 50 and 100 pages, collide with the large, dark, vague mass of the rest of the story. Whinge to husband about how this story will probably die the way those other two did, at 45,000 words, after months and months of work.

7. Think while walking from subway to work. Think while showering (and providing husband with keen insights into his own plots).

9. Hit 80,000 words, or thereabout. Start thinking, “It would be good to know how this ends, soon.”

10. Hit 90,000 words. Still no ending—but no panic, either, because what I’ve written is strong enough to support several endings, right? I simply have to figure out which one will work best.

11. One day or night, watching TV or a movie, or sitting on the porch with cats, kids, husband, wine, or reading someone else’s words: there it is. My ending.

12. Finish writing the book, 1.5-3 years after #3, above.

13. Return to top and repeat.

And now for the blog baton-passing. I’ll huff and puff up alongside A.M. Dellamonica and Kelly Robson, whom I met last year when they decamped from beautiful Vancouver to Toronto (for no reason my pining former Vancouverite husband could comprehend). Like Peter and I, they’re married. Like us, they both write: Alyx full time (like Peter), and Kelly whenever she can, depending on her day job (like me).

I’ll be going to London in a little over a month. I haven’t been there since I was three. My personal memories of it, therefore, are non-existent. My collective unconscious-type memories of it, though, are varied and vivid. There it is, in old family photos, in movies, on television (for the London of Sherlock is wonderful and compelling, no matter how thoroughly Stephen Moffat screws up his human characters). I might be thinking, “I pretty much know what to expect of London” — except that I made that mistake before, in 1998.

I went to Paris in 1998. I’d been there on that same “you’re three, so let’s take you to all sorts of fabulous places you won’t remember!” family tour. So no memory of it, either—and yes, a host of images from big screen and small. I had the impression that these images would prepare me, make me even, perhaps, a little blasé(e) about it all. After all, this wasn’t some unknown quantity of a city or country, as Oaxaca, Mexico had been. I’d expected to feel lost and exhilarated, when I went there, and to Spain—and I did. But Paris? Blah. Zay.

How wrong (and unforgivably stupid) I was.

I wandered, alone, shaky, at first, from trans-Atlantic sleeplessness. Cobblestones and narrow, climbing streets, moules marinières at Les Deux Magots, Rodin’s Gates of Hell at the Musée D’Orsay, the Seine with its bridges: I was swept away.

And all that was before The Moment.

My modest lodgings, the Hotel Malher…

The desk clerk was a vegetarian! In Paris!

…were just up the street from what I’d identified early on in my stay as a medieval monastery. I was busy, though, hopping the Métro every day, with smug yet relieved panache, to a convention centre where I sat in a booth, pushing the language school where I worked—so I didn’t investigate the monastery right away. When I finally did, I didn’t know what to expect, other than more wonderful old stone and a warren of dank little rooms.

Now I must digress. In the bathroom that was mine, as of age 13, I pinned one of my favourite images: “La dame à la licorne à mon seul désir.”

It came from a calendar of medieval artwork. I loved it with a quiet, steady passion that kept me in the bathroom for far longer than I would otherwise have been. I saw it every day, from 13 to 19, and I had a smaller version of it with me at university. Its colours seeped into wherever it was that my writing came from. This image, and its attendant, magical words, made me profoundly happy.

Back to Paris, many years later. I’m tripping down the cobbled street from my hotel, toward the monastery. “Musée National du Moyen Age Thermes de Cluny,” I read, when I arrive at its gates. I wander in. I amble about, thinking what an amazing job’s been done, turning this space into a museum. Wander amble wander—and now I’m entering a large, round, windowless room, craning over a couple of shoulders, because I can see that there’s something attached to the tall stone walls—many somethings, in fact, stretched from floor to ceiling—and then I stop, and I start to cry.

My lady and my unicorn are here. The reds and golds and greens I’d gazed at for so many years: all here, and then some. There are scenes that are totally unfamiliar to me. And they’re not reproductions printed on smooth, glossy calendar paper stock: they’re wool and silk, woven in 1500. They’re here, a block from my hotel, and I had no idea—and so I stand, all teary and overcome, thinking incoherent thoughts about serendipity and Paris.

London has a lot to live up to. But at least I won’t be foolish enough to imagine I’ve seen it in movies, and that’ll be enough. At least I’ll know that the personal and collective may collide in ways I’d never have expected. And I’ll know not to over-program things—because wandering unfamiliar streets, with map and without plan, is the very best way to stumble on magic.